Introduction and current frameworks

In 2007, then prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, famously described climate change as “the great moral challenge of our generation” (Hudson 2017). Over 15 years later the issue is still one of the most complex and intractable issues to tackle with an effective and pragmatic moral framework. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) faces specific challenges here. The nature of military operations in general and warfare in particular is currently carbon intensive. The military also has a strong ethical imperative to remain subordinate to civil authority and not risk blurring its role and mandate. Frameworks of joint action, integrated campaigning, and civil-military dual use can provide relevant insight. In fact, the ADF has useful perspectives on climate change challenges due to the lethal and morally complex nature of its work, that can not only help inform its own understanding of climate ethics but also contribute to the broader discussions that are evolving in this area. This essay will take a look at the current ethical frameworks of the Australian military, the contributions of the military to climate harm, and how the military can understand its role and obligations in light of both moral imperatives and practical constraints.

It is worth being clear about what this essay is not. In particular, this essay is not about strategy. Climate is an area that is emerging as a priority strategic consideration for militaries in general and the ADF in particular given our domestic geography and also our location and role in the Pacific region. A changing climate is expected to affect operational concerns as broad as fuel security, resource based threat exacerbation, increased humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) and Defence Assistance to the Civil Community (DACC) burden, geopolitical relationships, and technological implementation. It is true that many of these strategic issues have an ethical component to them. However, this essay will focus on the moral dimension of climate change as a field in its own right and as much as practical steer away from strategic discussion. It is important to understand ethical motivation as intrinsically valuable rather than subservient to strategic goals.

This essay will also aim to focus on the issue of human induced climate change and avoid a broader but vaguer consideration of environmental issues in general. Again, deterioration of the natural environment in all its forms and the flow on social, economic, and geopolitical effects of that can be expected to affect the ADF and its ethical considerations, and this effect can be expected to deepen as deterioration worsens and public sentiment strengthens. It is also true that many issues have both a climate specific dimension and a broader environmental dimension; for example, deforestation and land degradation from conflict having a negative effect on biodiversity and natural resources and also removing a natural carbon sink, or burning of fossil fuels leading to particulate pollution that lowers local air quality as well as releasing globally relevant greenhouse gases. The nature of these broader environmental issues is often such that some of the concerns discussed here in a climate context will also be applicable to them, for example intergenerational and geographically diffuse consequences, and complex impact and responsibility chains. However, for the sake of clarity of parameters this essay will focus on these concepts from a climate change specific angle.

The ADF has in place an ethical framework that applies to all its operations and members. The most relevant doctrinal publication is the ‘ADF Philosophical Doctrine on Military Ethics’ (ADF-P-0 ME). This publication outlines the theoretical ethical basis of the ADF as being underpinned by virtue ethics, duty ethics, and natural law theory. It specifically rejects ethical relativism and also consequentialist ethics. This latter theory is rejected on the basis of the complexity of calculating and weighing consequences and the risk of the “greater good” being used to justify unreasonable acts. ADF-P-0 ME does clarify though that “Considering the consequences of our actions in deciding whether they are the right thing to do is essential.” (ADF Philosophical Doctrine - Military Ethics p18)

The ADF also respects Just War Theory as a branch of natural law theory. Just War Theory is an ethical framework distinct to conflict and is traditionally comprised of Jus ad Bellum as a framework for considering the ethics of deciding to go to war and Jus in Bello as a framework for ethical conduct during the waging of a war. In more recent years Jus post Bellum has been proposed as a framework for ethical considerations following a war and Jus ad Vim (and adjacent Jus in Vi and Jus post Vim) has been proposed as a framework for navigating the ethics of use of force short of war. Jus post Bellum is a concept particularly relevant to climate considerations. Theoretical ethics in general and Just War Theory in particular evolved largely to deal with the actions of an individual and their immediate and concrete consequences. Just War Theory especially is focused on protecting individual people from direct suffering and death in a war context, as much as is practical. This immediate and concrete approach can be less clear and pragmatic to map onto an issue like climate change that is characterised by long and uncertain consequential chains causing diffuse and temporally distant suffering.

While it is important not to conflate legal requirement with ethical acceptability, a look at legislation and the history of its development can give useful insight into the current thought in this space. ‘The climate’ as a unique object is not significant in international law but the broader ‘environment’ is protected both explicitly under the Convention on the prohibition of military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques (EnMod) and implicitly as being intrinsically civilian in nature and therefore subject to the restraints of proportionality and military necessity as any other civilian object would be (ICRC 2020). Historically, legislation has been proposed to strengthen environmental protection including the draft of the Rome Statute including an article that condemned anyone who “wilfully causes or orders the causing of widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment”  and genocide being initially conceived as a broad concept of destruction of a people and their culture, not necessarily by direct slaughter, but also encompassing indirect means such as destroying the environment that an indigenous people relied on (Gauger et al. 2012). Recently there has been a suggestion of a 5^th Geneva Convention specific to environmental protection (Watts 2019).

Domestically, Australia is party to the Paris Agreement with a goal to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius and an aspiration of 1.5 degrees Celsius (Australian Government 2024). The latest version of Australia’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2022, commits to reducing emissions 43% below 2005 levels by 2030. This represents an acceleration of change on previous commitments. The NDC also confirms a commitment to reach net zero by 2050. However, defence and security agencies are specifically exempt from a 2030 net zero target for Commonwealth Government agencies (Australian Government 2022), and there have been ongoing exemptions from reporting on military emissions in international agreements in order to protect nations’ security interests (Coyne & Rifat, 2024). This legal framework provides a landscape for the national conscience on this issue as well as the acknowledgement, in the defence and security exemptions, that the ADF faces unique challenges in climate responsible behaviour.

Direct military impact and just war theory

The obvious primary concern for the ADF is in the burning of fossil fuels and the resultant emissions in its operations. Military activity is notoriously polluting across ships and aircraft in addition to regular vehicle transport and energy requirements. Some technologies including small electric powered systems and nuclear are in use or development, but liquid fossil fuel dependence is endemic to all modern militaries. Given the high expenditure and long lifetime of military assets, a future focused acquisition model is required to avoid locking in fuel requirements that will become increasingly impractical and unconscionable as the energy landscape transitions. As the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) points out, many of these carbon intensive problems are also paralleled in civilian industry, and the solutions to them will require the ADF communicating and collaborating with research and development in aviation, commercial shipping, and other industries (Yildirim & Leben 2022).

As well as the ongoing climate impacts of peacetime military activity, warfare itself is acutely damaging. As ethicist Adam Betz states “Both the preparation for war and the waging of war itself are highly carbon-intensive enterprises, and contribute to the very deforestation, pollution, and emissions of GHGs [greenhouse gases] that exacerbate climate change.” (Betz 2019) He goes on to add that infrastructure that is damaged or destroyed by warfare will impose more construction related emissions in their repair and replacement. The concept of Jus post Bellum is perhaps the most relevant lens to view this through. The ethical consideration of ongoing suffering that occurs after a war has formally ended is a newer addition to Just War Theory, that originally comprised only of Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello. This acknowledgement of ethical consequences and responsibility beyond the cessation of hostilities has particular relevance for climate change where the negative effects of increased emissions can be felt even generations after the actions that caused them.

From a more immediate Jus ad Bellum or Jus in Bello perspective, consideration of the climate damage caused by warfare could re-balance the calculation of ‘a better peace’ and certain means and methods of fighting will have more acute consequences in a more fragile world. For example, any damage to food or water resources could be more difficult to mitigate and replace in an environmentally destabilised climate, and social and political instability caused by warfare could have harsher consequences in a state already struggling with resource depletion. The ADF’s own greenhouse gas pollution, the high intensity damage caused by kinetic warfare, and the shifting relationship between climate destabilisation and the risk and weight of secondary harms are all immediate concerns for the existing ethical framework.

Joint action, integrated campaigning, and lessons by analogy

As we have seen, much of the field of military ethics and the ADF’s understanding of its moral obligations is focused on kinetic warfare and the immediate human cost of such. Climate change does not fit neatly into this framework. Damage is caused by collective and continuous greenhouse gas emissions and other secondary behaviours such as deforestation, and is ongoing in both peacetime and war. The harms caused are diffuse across both geographic and also inter-generational lines. A significant part of the suffering caused by climate change will be borne by future generations who do not exist yet and even non-human animals not considered by traditional military ethics theory but nonetheless capable of suffering. The extent of this suffering is not just dependant on the severity of climate change itself, but also intersects with issues such as poverty and states’ administration and resource management. Added to this is the continuing uncertainty of what impacts will be felt when and how, as the relevant science continues to develop. In this complex space, constructing a pragmatic ethical framework is a daunting task.

In particular, it is a firm moral imperative for the ADF to be subordinate to civil authority. An issue as broad as climate change requires a coordinated whole of government response, and indeed whole of humanity response. The ADF must rightly be careful not to undermine the authority of civil government or to muddy the waters by speaking or acting outside its mandate or where another body (for example the Climate Change Authority) has a more appropriate claim. Nevertheless, to disengage entirely from the issue would leave the ADF with a consciously incomplete ethical framework, silent on one of the most significant challenges it will face. The ADF’s understanding of and response to climate harm must operate within these constraints.

The philosopher Seumas Miller’s theory of joint action provides a useful model for understanding this obligation for action within a structure of other agents and their hierarchies. He defines joint actions as “actions involving a number of agents performing interdependent actions in order to realise some common goal” (Miller 2011). This concept is extrapolated into layered structures of joint actions, that is where several agents perform joint actions to achieve a group goal, and multiple groups in achieving their respective goals together achieve a combined goal. As an illustration he offers the example of multiple military units each achieving specific missions, and those missions in combination achieving a higher level goal of winning a battle. He clarifies that “organizations consist of an (embodied) formal structure of interlocking roles.” With this framework, we can conceptualise the ADF’s climate relevant actions and working groups as a mid-layer in layered structure of joint actions comprised of both individual and organisational agents.

The ADF’s concept of integrated campaigning is relevant here, as detailed in the doctrinal publication Integrated Campaigning for Deterrence. (2024) To be clear, this publication is intended for military campaigns directed against a clear and comparable adversary such as a nation state. It is not a document written with climate change or philosophical frameworks at the forefront. Nevertheless, as an example of how the ADF sees itself and its actions as forming a constituent component of a broad and complex goal realised by multiple diverse parties working together, it is conceptually useful for this discussion. Integration with industry, academia, arms of national power, and international allies, is becoming increasingly significant across all domains of defence activity. As well as the concrete strategic benefits of this, opportunity arises to broaden discussion of complex ethical concerns, such as climate change, across diverse partners with diverse view points. Developing a clearly articulated understanding internally will also enable the ADF to integrate our ethical frameworks with our partners’ without miscommunication or neglect of significant issues.

Miller also highlights epistemic actions, that is actions related to thought and knowledge, as particularly relevant to climate change (Miller 2011). The ADF has an unusual and valuable perspective here due to the nature of the ethical issues the organisation deals with in the use of force. In particular, the moral imperative to maintain a stable climate is significantly a question of the human deaths that will result from greater climate instability and resulting agricultural disruption, natural disasters, and other consequences. This can be a psychologically and politically difficult conversation to have without veering into either cynical euphemism or unharnessed distress. The military is almost uniquely prepared to participate in candid and clear eyed discussion about the weight of life and death in organisational decisions due to the lethal nature of war and the long history of such study in our profession.

Likewise, many of the ‘muddier’ and more daunting complexities of climate change have at least some analogy to moral dilemmas military personnel are familiar with. Tim Christion has described climate challenges as “a ‘perfect moral storm’ of practical motives to ignore or rationalize away ethical imperatives to act” (Christion 2022). One such consideration is the ‘moral asymmetry’ involved in various national responses to a global level problem. While some militaries and alliances, such as the US military and NATO, are looking to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions (Shackleton 2023), this cannot be universally expected of all armed forces, or indeed nation states, including some which might be adversarial to Australia and seek to exploit ADF reticence to use climate damaging warfare methods for their own strategic advantage. The ADF is familiar with moral asymmetry challenges in counterinsurgency and counter terrorism operations and with the resulting balance between ethical acceptability and military necessity.

The concept of proportionality is relevant here. The ADF-P-0 ME clarifies “Unlimited liability requires from us the highest standards of behaviour, ethical reasoning and self-restraint. It may involve putting ourselves at risk to make sure that the force we use is restrained and proportionate.” As climate impacts worsen, and clean energy and technology is developed, the balance will shift between what is proportionately acceptable and militarily necessary, and ‘set and forget’ paradigms will not be sufficient. A complicating factor in climate specific proportionality calculations is that of the uncertainty of consequences.As the level of greenhouse gas concentration climbs into uncharted territory and the science of predicting impacts and tipping points continues to develop, understanding of risk will be constantly evolving.

These negative consequences are particularly challenging to calculate and assign obligation, because of both the shared nature of the climate (all nations suffer from climate destabilisation though not in equal proportion) and the shared nature of responsibility (all nations share some blame for climate harm also not in equal proportion). Again, the military has some relevant previous experience in navigating this dilemma particularly in the three domains of the ocean, space, and cyberspace. These global “commons” have been subject to significant discussion about how to protect them from malicious or negligent damage and collaboratively preserve them for the collective good. Various international agreements have emerged including the Law of the Sea and the Outer Space Treaty. Issues as diverse as over-fishing, space debris, and attribution of cyber attacks, have relevant lessons for climate change challenges such as externalised costs of greenhouse gas pollution, uncertainty of climate impacts and tipping points, and the difficulty of accurately attributing historic and current emissions.

A more concrete issue is that of so called ‘dual-use’ technology and the research and development that goes into it. This refers to technology that can be used in different ways with different moral consequences, often an entirely peaceful civilian use and a destructive or violent military use. The term is sometimes used to refer to any technology that has both military and civilian uses. Possible climate relevant technologies that could fall into this area include nuclear technologies and geoengineering. One of the challenges that arises is that of regulation. There exists a risk that civilian researchers do not engage with the possible negative consequences of their research on the understanding that ‘pure’ science is fundamentally amoral, and that simultaneously national governments are one step removed from international legal restrictions around weapon development when that research is occurring in independent institutions for ostensibly civilian purposes (Handmer 2021).

We can see that while existing military ethical theory is difficult to map onto the issue of climate change it still contains useful insights and provides valuable context. Collaborative approaches such as the philosophical ‘joint action’ or the ADF’s ‘integrated campaigning’ have relevance and the ADF has a wealth of prior experience with ethical dilemmas that hold lessons for how to approach the challenges of climate change ethics.

Conclusion

The scale of the current climate crisis makes it one of the most pressing current ethical considerations. The breadth and complexity of factors that are exacerbating it, along with the diffusion and distance of consequences also make it one of the most challenging issues to form clear sighted frameworks around. The ADF has at the heart of its approach to ethical responsibility a long international history of military ethical theory, a large body of international law, and more specific domestic frameworks and regulations such as doctrinal publications. From a climate change specific perspective, the ADF faces particular challenges in decarbonising due to the nature of current military technologies and the particularly damaging nature of warfare. Added to this is the complication of maintaining clear distinction of mandates while also not disengaging from morally relevant issues. Collaborative approaches to moral problems are valuable frameworks to address this issue. The ADF also has unique perspectives through analogy with well-trodden military dilemmas to inform both its own practice and participate in integrated discussions of ethical considerations.